I Wondered…

…when I put the CD in for the first time in a couple of years, if I could make it through Beth Nielsen Chapman‘s “Sand and Water” album without tears, and of course I could not, with the first verse of the title song all the faces, presences, memories gather as if looking on from a close but unreachable distance…

I heard the song for the first time in the dance studio of my friends Barry and Michael, and in the years since, the layers of resonance have only grown.  Chapman herself (who wrote the album after losing her husband to cancer) has spoken of how profound sorrow is a source of deep learning and deepened meaning.  She also says there is no way around grief: “there is only through to the other side.”